A midwest Paean

It appears that I'll be moving out of the Midwest in just over six months, and while there are a number of people, places and things I'll miss, today I'd like to give a shout-out to one of those places.

When I was in my junior year of college, I studied for a semester in Quito, Ecuador, on a program sponsored by the University of Illinois. And there, in the heart of the Andes, in a magical colonial city crowned with fog, surrounded by steppe-farmed mountainsides, country markets, and milennial cultures, one day I suddenly suffered an acute pang of nostalgia. Know what I miss? I asked one of the Illinois girls I was travelling with at the time. Meijer's. I know, she replied, I was just thinking that the other day. There, on the far side of the ecuatorial line, steeped in beauty and wonder, we sat pining for the Midwest's premiere twenty-four-hour discount general store.

My father, who has lived in Florida on and off for the last couple of decades, sent me a Meijer gift card for Christmas last year, such is the place's hold on his heart and imagination. I immediately understood the subtext of the gift, which was to urge me to appreciate my fortune in being a resident of a state graced by the Thrifty Acres.

Sam Walton can open a Super-Walmart across the street from me and provide teleporting inside it, and Target can hand out complementary, green-tea-flavored truffles with artful chinese characters stenciled into the chocolate with every purchase, but they will never fill the niche in my heart destined forever to be occupied by Meijer. Where else -- tell me, where? -- can you go when you urgently need a bikini, a socket wrench, a fifth of bourbon and a box of dog biscuits at three o'clock in the morning? That's right: nowhere. Meijer is open every. Single. Day. Of. The. Year. All day and all night. What did you say you needed? Yeah, Meijer has that. Maybe not the best quality, but serviceable and at a reasonable price.

These reasons would be enough to make Meijer a great store, but it's more than that. The store's so big and random you can disappear in it. When we couldn't sleep sometimes in college we'd go out to Meijer and have scavenger hunts, each trying to bring back the weirdest products on the market in given categories. Getting kicked out of Meijer, far from constituting a deterrent, was a point of ironic pride, and anyway the banishments never seemed to stick. We could kill hours of insomnia in the Meijer Time Warp, people-watching and without spending a dime, then another 45 minutes trying to remember where we'd parked.

I grew up with Meijer's Thrifty Acres, and recently, I've got to hand it to them, it appears Meijer has done some growing up of its own. I don't know if there's a new CEO or a new market research team or what, but the place just keeps getting better and better. Meijer-brand products have a new look to them that makes it easier, in many cases, to identify the pricier products they are knocking off, a subtle communicative trick that makes shopping easier. They have introduced a "Gold" line of products, including the black bean/corn salsa they used to sell in their deli case, and new funky ones like the equally addictive habanero/lime salsa, mango/chipotle salad dressing and so on. They have divided their international section by region and have a remarkable selection of ethnic foods, ingredients and even toiletries. Check-out has been greatly streamlined, and they offer reusable bags for purchase as well as a slight discount for using them. They have alleviated somewhat the Meijer Warp Effect by offering run-in-run-out grocery items like milk and eggs immediately adjacent to the checkout lanes.

Best of all, they have made organic products available at prices that I can't even understand. I have no idea how they're doing this. All I know is that I can buy organic refried beans with roasted green chiles, organic marinara sauce, and organic whole-bean Colombian coffee cheaper than I can buy the non-organic, name-brand version. It's almost too good to be true (and if you have some kind of inside information that it isn't, please wait until I move to burst my bubble). I think Meijer has the right idea in using their corporate chutzpah and deep pockets to mainstream organic products and offer them at a price that's accessible to your average starving graduate student, so they now get the lion's share of my grocery budget.

I'm sure Rozee and others will cringe if they read this, and I'd like to say that I still won't buy peanut butter anywhere except at People's Food Co-op. I'd probably shop more at the Co-op if I didn't consistently wait until 9:30 on Sunday night to remember I'm out of food. Also if they sold socket wrenches and bikinis. But until they do, and until I move, there's Meijer, a place I already know I will sorely miss.